Archive of Our Own ^beta

Shinichi finds the cat behind the police station by accident.

He’s a month into his stint as a patrolman at the police box in Ekoda—which, to be clear, he’s not thrilled about. Megure had argued to his superiors that Shinichi has basically been carrying Division One on his back for nearly ten years, minus the year or so he went missing (aka when he was Conan). When that had failed, Shinichi had attempted to use his nepo baby status to get preferential treatment.

But the higher-ups had insisted that Shinichi go through the standard career path of a graduate fresh from the academy, aka starting out as a neighborhood patrolman and then working his way up to detective status. Something about there being significant media attention on the police as an institution, due to some corruption scandals and a slew of sexual harassment lawsuits. Shinichi found that difficult to argue with.

It’s been only seventy percent terrible, because while most of him misses solving actual cases, a small portion of him finds the everyday conundrums he encounters sort of fun. It reminds him of when he used to solve cases with the Detective Boys as Conan. At least, the more wholesome cases and not the kidnappings and murders, he supposes. As an aside, now that he’s an adult with a fully functioning frontal lobe, he wonders why the Detective Boys’ parents let them hang out with him when he routinely exposed them to gruesome crime scenes.

Anyway, Shinichi is about to go out on patrol on a Thursday afternoon, settling his hat on his head as he steps out of the police box, when he hears a faint meowing. Frowning, Shinichi pauses on the doorstep, wondering if he’s finally lost his mind. It wouldn’t surprise him; being subjected to Haibara’s many prototype APTX4869 antidotes was bound to have some kind of effect on his long-term health outcomes.

He sticks his head back inside the police box. His partner and supposed mentor, Kinomiya, is sitting at the front desk and appears to be filling out a page of a sudoku book.

“Did you hear a cat?” he asks.

“Do you smell burnt toast?” she returns without looking up, penciling in a 6 with mechanical precision. “Are you feeling dizzy? Nauseated? Losing consciousness?”

“I’m not having a medical emergency,” Shinichi says, offended.

“It’s very possible even if you’re young,” Kinomiya replies with a shrug. “I’ve seen how much instant ramen you eat. Consuming that much sodium is asking for heart attacks and strokes.”

Shinichi retracts his head. He’s about to start walking his beat, phantom cat and slander of his (admittedly poor) eating choices be damned, when he hears it again. This time it’s loud enough that he’s sure he isn’t hallucinating. It’s also insistent enough that Shinichi is able to follow it down the alley beside the police box to the little patch of grass between the backside of the building and a chain link fence that separates the police box from the parking lot of a convenience store.

The culprit is a standard-issue gray tabby cat with adorably white paws. Judging from the fact that it’s approximately the size and shape of a prize-winning pumpkin, it’s a fully-grown cat, and despite its bulk, it seems agile enough when it cowers away from him, blinking dilated green eyes up at him. It’s sitting in an old orange crate that’s been turned on its side, draped in a dusty but relatively new-looking blanket. There are a couple of toys strewn about the area, as well as a metal bowl filled with water. Shinichi discovers the reason for the meowing when he sees how the cat’s claws are tangled in the blanket.

“Oh,” he says. “Can’t you get out of that yourself?” The cat, predictably, does not respond. It looks freaked out when Shinichi approaches slowly, the fur standing up along its spine, but to Shinichi’s surprise, doesn’t struggle when Shinichi gently unhooks its claws from the blanket. Once it’s free, it stares at him for a solid ten seconds before shooting out of the box and darting around him with the speed of a much smaller and slimmer cat.

“You’re welcome,” Shinichi says once it’s just him in the clearing. To be clear, he didn’t become a police officer for the praise, but it would’ve been nice if the cat had stuck around to be petted at least.

Shinichi doesn’t forget about the cat, and only partially because he’s still miffed about not getting to pet it. There’s obviously someone taking care of the cat, judging from the water bowl and toys and blanket, but he’s not sure how often that care comes. It's probably a stray, just a well-fed one, but there is a chance it's a lost pet, in which case, he should probably try to get a picture to post around, or take it to see if it’s microchipped.

He grabs some cat food from the convenience store just beside where the cat hides and leaves out a can of wet food every day, checking periodically to see if the cat is around. He never sees the cat, but the food is always gone by the end of the day, so either the cat is still in the vicinity or Shinichi is keeping the local raccoon population well-fed.

A couple of weeks pass like this. It’s another normal day at the station, overcast as the season begins its reluctant transition into fall proper. Shinichi isn’t expecting any different from his usual routine of swapping the empty can for the new one as he rounds the corner, open can in hand. He’s contemplating the coming winter and wondering if he should try to bring another blanket or maybe a self-warming pad—some Googling had revealed that cats like those—when he discovers that a) the cat is actually present for once, and b) there is a person crouching by the cat, petting it.

Shinichi freezes. Absurdly, his first thought is jealousy that the cat is letting someone else pet it when Shinichi has been buying it premium paté for the last two weeks.

“Oh,” he says. The person looks up. The person is a guy around Shinichi’s age, with familiar mischievous eyes and hair that sticks up in cowlicks all over his head and toned forearms that are exposed despite the late-autumn chill. The person is extremely attractive.

“You,” Shinichi says, tone accusing. The person blinks at him. Shinichi rallies. “You’re the other person who’s been taking care of the cat?”

“You’re the one who’s been buying him that fancy food?” the guy says, his mouth turning up at one side in a crooked smirk. Shinichi grips the can of food too tightly and accidentally digs his thumb into paté, wincing at the feeling of mush going under his thumbnail. Oblivious, the guy scratches the cat under the chin. The cat tilts its—his, apparently—head back, magnanimously providing more room. “No wonder he won’t eat the kibble I used to give him.”

“Sorry?” Shinichi says, then more strongly, “I wasn’t sure how much water he was getting, and I read that wet food is better for keeping cats hydrated. And this brand is supposed to be good quality, according to the cat food databases that I looked at. The first ingredients in all their wet foods are a named animal protein.” He realizes how dumb he sounds a moment too late and clams his mouth shut. The guy grins at him.

“You did research? That’s cute, Kudou,” he says. Shinichi raises an eyebrow at him.

“How did you know my name?” he asks, pointed. The guy blanches and falters in his petting. The cat, unimpressed, headbutts the guy’s hand until he resumes stroking down the fur of his head.

“It’s on the pocket of your uniform,” the guy says after a moment of noticeably frenzied thought, motioning at Shinichi’s left breast pocket with the hopeful air of a novice billiards player being circled by pool sharks. Shinichi, who’s been holding the cat food in front of him with his left hand and thereby blocking the guy’s view of the aforementioned pocket, pointedly moves his hand away to reveal that his breast pocket bears no such inscription.

“Um,” the guy says, dragging out the sound.

“You do realize that I’m moderately famous, right?” Shinichi feels he has to point out. “You don’t have to pretend not to recognize me. It’s reasonable for someone with no intimate”—the guy’s eyebrows lift; Shinichi flinches and presses on—“I mean, someone with no personal connection to me to know what my name is.”

“Oh, right,” the guy says. “Yeah. That’s how I knew your name. Because you’re famous and not because we’ve met.”

“Right,” Shinichi says, holding back an eyeroll. “And you are?”

“Um,” the guy says, and treats Shinichi to another moment of visible panic before he seems to come to a decision, squaring his shoulders and rising so he’s looking Shinichi in the face. He takes a deep breath, steeling himself. “I’m Kuroba Kaito.” It even sounds like his actual name. Shinichi feels his eyebrows rise, surprised at this turn of events even as he pledges to do some deep Google stalking (and perhaps even some scouring of police records) the second he’s back at his desk.

“Really?” he says, unable to keep the shock out of his voice.

“Is that how you respond to people giving you their names, darling?” Kaito says with a bemused, incredulous laugh. His expression turns speculative. “I wonder how you’d react to getting my number, then.”

Shinichi drops the can of food. It lands on its side and rolls, spilling cat food out on the dirt. The cat, confidence apparently bolstered by Kaito’s presence, trots up and starts eating it, undeterred.

“Kudou,” says Kaito solemnly, over the loud, licky sounds of the cat eating, “I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship.” Despite his confusion, Shinichi frowns.

“Don’t you mean friendship?” He’s pretty sure that’s what the original quote says.

“No,” Kaito says comfortably, and tosses in a wink that makes Shinichi take an instinctive step back. “Relationship.”

As it turns out, the cat is:

• About a year and a half old
• Possibly part Maine Coon, based on his size
• Vaccinated and neutered thanks to a vet trip Kaito provided
• A stray, or at least not microchipped, per the vet trip
  • Kaito eventually had him chipped with his own contact information
• Unable to live with Kaito due to the no-pets policy for Kaito’s graduate school housing
• In possession of a name that Kaito refuses to tell Shinichi

The only fact that really throws Shinichi is the last one.

“If I guess what it is, will you tell me if I get it right?” he asks.

“Do you think this is a modern-day retelling of Rumpelstiltskin?” Kaito says, arching a brow. Shinichi blinks at him.

“Wouldn’t that make the cat Rumpelstiltskin, since it’s his name that I’m trying to guess?” he says. “Does he even want my firstborn child?” They turn to look at the cat, who is grooming himself in a delicate place with a detached air and seems mostly uninterested in acquiring a human infant. They both watch for a moment in silence. “Is it Rumpelstiltskin?”

“No, darling,” Kaito says, audibly amused. At the “darling,” Shinichi fumbles the bag he’s holding and spills a small pile of catnip treats out onto the ground. The cat springs from his relaxed position to attack the pile with abandon, to some halfhearted protests from the adults in the situation (Kaito and Shinichi).

It’s a week or so after the first time they stumbled upon each other. Apparently Kaito has had a schedule this whole time, but it’s unpredictable to any sane person, as it’s based on his wildly varying class schedule. Hours after they’d met, he had texted Shinichi a copy of his timetable and marked out the times that he would be visiting the cat. Shinichi made some noise about only coming to see the cat when his schedule permits; he’s already traded two patrol times with Kinomiya so that he and Kaito show up at the same time.

The cat, having devoured his pile of treats, pads up to Shinichi and runs figure eights around his legs until Shinichi crouches to pet him. The cat has warmed up to him since getting Kaito’s confirmation that Shinichi is friendly. Quite literally: the second time they'd all met, Kaito had sat the cat down, held his face firmly in both hands hamburger-style, and said, “Kudou is your new secondary emergency contact, okay, buddy? Meow once if you understand.” (The cat had meowed twice, which Kaito construed as doubly approving and Shinichi privately thought indicated disagreement. But the cat has been much more affectionate to him ever since, so perhaps Kaito was correct.)

“So, will you have any children in the future, do you think?” Kaito asks. Shinichi, who has progressed from crouching to kneeling to allow the cat to half-clamber into his lap, look up in confusion. His thoughts have turned to whether he would have to get his uniform dry-cleaned to get the mud out of the knees of his pants, so it takes him a moment to pick back up on what Kaito is even talking about.

“That’s personal, isn’t it?” he settles on.

“It would be an easier question to answer if you had a partner,” Kaito says musingly. He strokes a big hand over his chin. Today he’s wearing a clingy cable-knit sweater in a cream color that is, unfortunately for Shinichi, devastating on him. “So does that mean you don’t have a significant other?”

Pausing, Shinichi rewinds several steps in the conversation and tries to piece together how they got to this point and what Kaito’s real intentions are. Sometimes talking to Kaito feels like solving a case, riddled with red herrings and distractions. Following his leaps of logic is not dissimilar to weaving together the threads of a locked-room murder.

“Are you asking if I’m single?” he says once he’s finally worked it out. Kaito grins and winks.

“I always knew you were a smart one, darling.”

Shinichi breaks into a hacking fit. The cat glares at him for the noise, but graciously allows Shinichi to continue petting him while he formulates a response.

“I don’t see how my relationship status is of any interest to you,” he settles on. When Kaito’s brow scrunches, gearing up for a pout of epic proportions, he sighs and adds, “But no, I’m not seeing anybody right now. Things with Ran fizzled when I got back, and I haven’t seriously dated since then.” He gives a blasé shrug that he hopes conveys “please do not do the math on that statement and realize that I’m admitting I haven’t dated in almost ten years.”

“Right, from your overseas cases,” Kaito says with great care, which seems unnecessary. Shinichi is about to point that out when Kaito continues, “But if someone handsome and suave and caring, perhaps, came along, then you would be very interested in him, I presume?”

“I only like women,” Shinichi says gravely, and then, when Kaito’s face freezes, snickers.

“You ass,” Kaito says, but he sounds excruciatingly fond. “So to be clear, you would be down to go out with a super cool guy who’s great with animals?” He does finger guns. Shinichi stares first at his face, then at the finger guns.

“No, sorry,” he says. “I only date bad boys.” It’s Kaito’s turn to stare.

“Bad boys?” he parrots.

“You know, a guy who slicks back his hair, doesn’t wear capes because capes are embarrassing, dresses in designer suits,” Shinichi deadpans, waving a hand dismissively. It’s his petting hand; the cat, unimpressed, reaches up with both paws to pull the hand back down onto his face. “Commits tax evasion, has a secret lair, drives a fast car, wouldn’t be caught dead feeding and caring for a stray cat. All of that.” Kaito squints, his mouth turned down at the corners.

“Aren’t you a police officer?” he says eventually. “Why would you want to be with a criminal, let alone someone who commits tax evasion? That’s the least sexy type of crime.”

“I disagree strongly,” Shinichi says. Elder abuse, for example, is distinctly less sexy. “Is that really the only thing on that list that you have an issue with?”

“I think so,” Kaito says, still frowning. It’s then that he checks his watch and winces. “Dammit, I really need to catch the train back to the university. Bye, baby.” Shinichi’s brain short circuits until he squats down to scritch the cat behind the ears. It’s just beginning to reboot when Kaito, still crouched enough that they’re eye-to-eye, looks at Shinichi and says, smile soft, “Bye, darling,” and tousles Shinichi’s hair as he gets back up. Shinichi mumbles out a combination of sounds that he hopes is a farewell in a human language.

He goes back into the police box a couple of minutes later, when the cat finally gets bored of being petted and struts off to do whatever important cat business he does when he isn’t being cooed over by Kaito and Shinichi. Kinomiya looks up as he comes in and raises an eyebrow.

“Have you been servicing someone behind the station?” she says, her tone surprisingly free of judgment. Shinichi blinks and looks down at his dusty knees.

“No?” he tries, then more strongly, “No! There’s a cat that lives back there. This guy and I have been taking care of him together.” He gestures at his thighs. “Look, there’s cat hair all over me. That’s proof.”

“Mhmm,” Kinomiya says, knowing. “Well, let me know the next time you need to ‘take care of the cat’ with someone. I’m not going to report you, because God knows we’ve all been there, but you probably shouldn’t be doing it in the middle of the day. There are schools around here, for one, and for another, you’re in uniform.” She glances at the wall clock. “Speaking of which, isn’t it time for you to make your afternoon rounds?”

Suppressing a sigh, Shinichi grabs his hat off his desk and stomps out to start his patrol.

Is the cat named Lupin? Shinichi texts Kaito a couple days later.

no but honestly not a bad guess, is the response. Shinichi goes back to the drawing board.

Funnily enough, Shinichi doesn’t even realize anything is amiss until someone points it out to him. Namely, a six-year-old named Momoko whose parents seem to think that a police box is the same as an after-school program, considering how often she ends up waiting at the station until her mother comes to get her.

“Did you get my juice?” she demands from where she’s sitting at Shinichi’s desk, swinging her legs. Shinichi, who has been demoted to one of the creaky folding chairs intended for visitors, reaches into their mini-fridge to pull out her lychee juice. He started stockpiling it after the third time she plonked herself down at his desk and demanded it upon threat of tantrum.

“Here you go, princess,” he says, sliding the bottle across the table to her. She takes it with a pleased air.

“Thank you, servant,” she says graciously. “Keep that up and maybe someday you’ll get promoted like Kinomiya-san was.” Shinichi can only assume the hierarchy she’s referring to exists only in her head. Kinomiya hasn’t been promoted in fifteen years.

“You’re too kind, Your Majesty.”

“Quite,” Momoko agrees. She takes a big sip of her juice. Shinichi watches her like a hawk, preparing to intervene if she decides to spill juice all over his keyboard again. (He can’t prove that the last time was on purpose, but he had just insulted the Kamen Yaiba reboot when it happened. Honestly, he doesn’t understand why they’re rebooting it when it’s barely been a decade since the original series aired.) “I’m very kind, to put up with your mega-un-gentleman-li-ness.” Shinichi marvels silently at the expert application of prefixes and suffixes. “You should take lessons from Kid.”

Shinichi blinks at the non sequitur.

“Excuse me?”

“He’s a real gentleman,” Momoko informs him, tone didactic. “That’s what my mom says every time she’s assigned to cover a heist.” Momoko’s mother is a senior reporter for an actual print newspaper, which Shinichi finds very impressive in this day and age. “She also says that she would leave my dad for him because Kid wouldn’t forget me at school four days out of five.” She proclaims this with the glib carefreeness of a child oblivious to the tragedy of that sentence.

“I see,” Shinichi says, sensing that his true thoughts are not welcome here. He reaches a casual hand towards his police notebook to make a note that perhaps he needs to speak with Momoko’s mother when she comes in to pick up her daughter. She does always seem harried, but he assumed that was general parenting stress and her daughter’s constant disappearing act, not a sitcom-level-useless husband.

Oblivious, Momoko sips her juice.

“The girls at school all think he’s really cool, although I don’t really get it,” she says, kicking her feet up onto his desk. Shinichi gives her a narrow-eyed look until she heaves a great sigh, as though he’s requiring something monumental from her, and moves them off. “They always talk about how cool his hat and his cape are.”

“Those are the least cool parts of his outfit,” Shinichi says, aghast at the taste of second graders. Momoko nods at him sagely.

“Right?” They share a look of commiseration. Momoko shrugs. “But today they were complaining that he got rid of his cape at the heist last night. He also changed his suit, I guess. It’s not white anymore.” Shinichi nods along for a second until he freezes, several synapses in his brain firing in rapid succession.

“He got rid of his cape,” he repeats. It’s Momoko’s turn to squint at him.

“Yeah, that’s what I just said. It was a super random change since he hasn’t updated his outfit for, like, twenty million years or whatever. I dunno how old he is.” She finishes the last sip of her juice and gives him a pointed look. “Anyway, that’s all boring. Tell me about one of your cases.” She points an accusing finger at him. “But a good case. Not a kidnapping or anything. I wanna hear about a murder. With a beheading.” Her eyes light up. “An axe beheading!”

Shinichi recalls worrying about the Detective Boys’ collective sanity after witnessing so many crime scenes. Now he just wonders if the age of six simply marks the developmental stage when children become bloodthirsty little monsters.

“Okay, but don’t come crying to me if you have nightmares,” he says, clearing his throat. Momoko leans forward in anticipation, eyes sparkling. “It all started when my friend Ran and I went to stay at our friend Sonoko’s villa in the mountains of Gunma. Sonoko’s sister was there too, and she had invited her university film club. We were walking through the woods, about to cross a bridge that would lead us to the villa, when we saw a man in a cloak walking across the bridge. When he sensed us watching, he stopped, turned, and made eye contact with us just long enough for us to see that his face was covered in bandages.” Momoko gasps.

“Bandages! He must be one of the sister’s friends, right? Why else would he have to cover his face?”

“He could be a burn scar victim or something,” Shinichi points out.

“No, whenever there’s people stuck out in the middle of nowhere and someone shows up with their face covered, it’s a disguise. Why would a complete stranger bother to hide their face?” Momoko counters. Shinichi gives her a considering look.

“Have you ever considered becoming a detective when you grow up?”

“Obviously. I’m going to be the first female police superintendent general,” Momoko says, waving a hand. “Now continue. Who was the first to die? Oooh, I bet it was someone who was mean to everyone. Or someone who brought up some sad secret from their past.”

How about Salmon? Yellowtail? Tuna? Shinichi sends the day they go to a pet store and Kaito nearly passes out next to the cat litter when he catches sight of the betta fishes in the adjacent aisle.

wow u r so funny!!! would u name ur beloved pet after ur worst fear??

My worst fear is everyone I love dying while I watch powerlessly, so that would be a rather long name for a pet.

ya kinda long huh. maybe diane as a nickname? cuz it sounds like ‘dying’?

Your mind would be a psychologist’s playground.

aww wow that’s so sweet thx darling!!! <3

“So I heard something interesting the other day,” Shinichi says the next time he’s face-to-face with Kaito. It’s been a couple of days since he thrilled Momoko with his retelling of what she dubbed the “Mountain Villa Bandaged Man Murder Case.”

He and Kaito are behind the police box once again. Kaito is kneeling on the dusty ground, attempting to teach the cat how to do tricks. The cat is cooperating just enough to con treats out of Kaito. Shinichi, hovering nearby, has been trying (in vain) to calculate calories in his head and determine how much he’ll need to cut back on actual cat food to offset the treats. He senses that he may be the un-fun parent, between himself and Kaito. His part of the child support tends to be wet food and freeze-dried meal toppers intended to improve feline constipation, while Kaito provides treat after treat and a small arsenal of toys.

Not that they’re coparenting this cat, he tells himself.

“Shake,” Kaito tells the cat, holding out a hand. The cat lifts one paw—Shinichi and Kaito both hold their breath—and licks it, settling in to groom himself. Sighing, Kaito deposits a treat on the ground in front of him anyway, then twists to look up at Shinichi. “What did you hear? Are they doing another Sherlock Holmes adaptation?”

“There’s always a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation coming out, and rarely are any of them interesting,” Shinichi says, with no small amount of bitterness. The last iteration had featured Sherlock as a crime-solving meerkat with Watson as his bumbling canine companion. (It was possible that Shinichi had not been the target audience for that one.) “But no, my interesting news has to do with Kid.” He raises his eyebrows at Kaito.

Kaito lets out a nervous chuckle. He starts to close up the treat bag, possibly for something to do with his hands. The cat gives a displeased meow.

“Oh,” he says, sounding like an inexperienced actor directed to portray “casual interest.” “What did you hear?”

“That he’s started wearing Hugo Boss suits to his heists,” Shinichi says. He did some intense internet research after Momoko’s mother had finally shown up at the station to pick up her daughter—hopefully the cybersecurity people don’t look into the search history on his work computer, because they would find a frankly alarming number of articles from sites with names like “LIPSTICK – Your Outlet for Teen News and Trends.” It’s odd how the fanbase of a known felon consists mainly of girls in the ten to eighteen age range. “He’s abandoned the cape, apparently. I wonder why.” He hopes he tone conveys that he does not, in fact, wonder why.

“That’s very interesting indeed,” Kaito says, stroking his chin with one hand. The cat bashes his head against Kaito’s leg to demand pets; Kaito gives him an expert stroke behind the ears with his free hand. “But regardless of the why, he must seem like a super cool bad boy now. You know, the kind of guy who commits tax fraud.” He shrugs. “Maybe you should go to the next heist to see what he’s got going on. Who knows what might happen. Those rooftops sure are dark and private after all the reporters leave.”

Shinichi squints.

“What are you implying might happen?”

“Nothing,” Kaito says, too fast. “I wasn’t thinking about making out or anything. Nothing.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” says Shinichi, unimpressed. “Anyway, I think I’ll stay away, thanks. I haven’t gone to a Kid heist since I joined the force.” It’s mainly because Nakamori gets weird and passive-aggressive about having a “uniformed officer from a police box in Ekoda” butting into “his” scene, even though he knows Shinichi. Shinichi thinks it might just be an ego thing and also jealousy, considering how much higher Shinichi's rate of catching Kid is. “If Kid is trying to tell me something, he can tell me to my face.” He raises his eyebrows.

“Right,” Kaito says, a little frown developing between his eyebrows. He stops petting the cat for long enough that the cat snuffles at him. “But what if he’s not as much of a bad boy in real life as he is at heists? Would that be a... dealbreaker?”

“Dealbreaker?” Shinichi echoes. Kaito, surprisingly, goes a bit pink.

“Never mind,” he says, clearing his throat before he bends down to bring his face close to the cat’s. The cat stretches up to bump their noses together. Shinichi watches with some mild jealousy. The cat isn’t quite that comfortable with him yet; he tends to sniff Shinichi’s face from a distance and then lick his lips, which makes Shinichi wonder if he’s planning to ambush and eat Shinichi at some point.

“Well, I think that’s probably the farthest we’re going to get for today,” Kaito says when he stands up after giving the cat a final pet. “I don’t think the little guy should have any more treats anyway.”

“He’s already not so little,” Shinichi points out, crouching so he can run a hand over the cat’s well-padded side. He gives the cat a speculative once-over. “According to a lot of Reddit threads I’ve looked through, I think he might actually be considered overweight.” Kaito clasps a hand at his chest, feigning horror.

“Are you body-shaming our child, Kudou?”

“I don’t recall procreating with you,” Shinichi retorts, although something in his chest does an acrobatic flip at the casual way Kaito said “our.” Maybe they actually are coparenting this cat. He peers up at Kaito out of the corner of his eye as he continues to stroke down the cat's back.

Kaito grins. It has a distinct tinge of lecherousness.

“Yeah, the kid must be adopted. I’d make sure any procreation we do together is extremely memorable,” he says with a wink. It takes Shinichi a solid five seconds to process what he’s just said, and by that time, Kaito has breezed on. “Do you want to grab something to eat? I’m done with class for today.” Shinichi gives a pointed look down at his uniform.

“I’m still on the clock.”

“Does anything actually happen around here?” Kaito asks philosophically, rubbing a hand over his chin. “I’ve lived here my whole life and the only actual crime that I can recall happening is when someone spray-painted genitalia on that ugly statue of a chicken in Ekoda Park.”

“Since you’re a native, do you actually know why the city chose to put a giant statue of a chicken in the main park?” Shinichi has to ask, sidetracked. It’s been a lingering question ever since he first walked past the park on his route. As far as he can tell, Ekoda had no particular ties to chickens and/or fowl of any kind.

“There was a famous chicken sexer who lived in the neighborhood a few years back, and he commissioned the statue and had it set up in the park and nobody cared enough to stop him or have it removed,” Kaito says, remarkably blasé about the insanity of that explanation. Shinichi wasn’t aware that chicken sexers could be famous.

He's jolted from his contemplation of societal measurements of success by Kaito reaching down to put a hand on his head, as though Shinichi is another cat to be petted. When Shinichi looks up, Kaito raises his eyebrows expectantly.

“So? Dinner?” His hand slides down to the back of Shinichi’s neck. Shinichi has to suppress a shiver at the warmth of his fingertips against sensitive skin. “There’s a great soba place just down the street. Maybe after we can go food shopping for the little guy afterwards if there’s time?”

Kaito does make a fair point about Ekoda being relatively crime-free, Shinichi decides. Chicken sexers aside, Momoko hanging out at the police box is usually the most exciting thing that happens in any given day, and it’s late enough that she would’ve shown up by now if her parents were planning to use the station as their free babysitting.

“Let me check with Kinomiya-san,” he says finally.

Kinomiya is, unsurprisingly, quite supportive of this turn of events.

“Sure, take an hour or two. I’ll call you on your radio if something happens, but I doubt it,” she says, waving him off from her desk. Her gaze slides over Shinichi’s shoulder to land on where Kaito is lounging in the doorway to the police box, irritatingly hot in his stupid season-appropriate parka. She lowers her voice. “Is that the guy you’re, ah, taking care of the cat with?” Her tone implies that she does not believe in the existence of any cat.

“Yes,” Shinichi says. “But we’re actually taking care of a cat.” He gestures towards the back of the station where the cat resides. “You can go out back and see him.”

“I didn’t know you were into voyeurism,” Kinomiya says, wrinkling her nose. “It’s a little weird to offer that to your coworker, don’t you think?”

“It’s an actual cat,” Shinichi says helplessly. “Like, with ears and a tail and whiskers and everything. A literal cat that we both feed and play with.”

“Sure.” Kinomiya lifts an eyebrow in the universal gesture for “I’ll play along but you and I both know that you’re a lying liar who lies.” “You don’t need to be ashamed of him, you know. He’s a good-looking guy. Looks like he could run a 5K without dying, has all his teeth, probably does his own laundry.” She tilts her head from side to side, narrowing her eyes. “His hair’s pretty bad though. Or does it just look like that after you guys ‘take care of the cat’ together?”

“I’m leaving,” Shinichi announces, and does just that.

“What was your coworker saying about me?” Kaito asks as Shinichi stalks down the street. He barely has to adjust his stride to catch up, and Shinichi grudgingly admits that Kinomiya’s assessment of his physical fitness might be correct. And, he’s forced to acknowledge to himself as he glances sideways at Kaito’s expectant face, she’s also not wrong that Shinichi would like to take care of the cat with him, in the many senses of the phrase. He wonders if it’s obvious to everyone that he’s got a thing for Kaito, or if it’s just because Kinomiya has picked up on how quietly happy he’s been these last few weeks since he started seeing Kaito on the regular. Even if Kaito's recent actions have been bewildering.

“That you have bad hair,” he says.

Sherlock, Shinichi sends one afternoon when he’s bored at the station. This one is more of a hopeful guess than anything.

ofc not lmao who do u think i am?? some kind of detective nerd??? haha loser!

:(

wait no i was just joking! i didnt mean it like that i was just being an ass i swear don’t be sad

:( :( :(

would it make u feel better if i came over with lunch? my class is over in ten and then im done for the day

:) :) :)

After Momoko told him about the cape thing, Shinichi made a point of following several Kaitou Kid fan accounts on various social media platforms. He’s glad he did, because early one morning after Kid's next heist, his phone nearly vibrates off his bedside table with the force of how many notifications it receives at once. Grumbling to himself, Shinichi reaches out to catch it before it topples over and squints blearily at the still-pinging screen.

KID SEEN DRIVING BUGATTI CHIRON AWAY FROM SCENE OF HEIST, the topmost notification reads before it’s quickly replaced by a link to an Instagram video. Shinichi taps on the link with trepidation. He feels his eyebrows lifting as shaky handheld camera footage begins to play, showing Kid—who, from what he can tell, is wearing a very dapper tailored black suit—speeding away from the Beika Museum of Contemporary Art in an electric blue sportscar.

Shinichi decides that he needs three more hours of sleep at a minimum before he can even begin to contemplate dealing with this. He silences his phone and puts it back on his nightstand facedown.

Three and a half hours later, Shinichi is leaning against the wall beside the entrance to a Touto University lecture hall, on the phone with a very incredulous Ran.

“Tell me again what you said was happening to you. I’m sorry, it’s just so ridiculous,” she says. Shinichi sighs and rubs at the inner corners of his eyes.

“First of all, this is a hypothetical situation”—Ran gives a snort that even over the phone comes through clearly as “I may not have spent my teenage years putting on elaborate deduction shows, but I am not actually an idiot”—“that has nothing to do with me. It’s from a… Reddit post that I saw.”

“Which post?” Ran asks innocently. “Send me a link so I can read the full story.”

“Uh… Reddit has been deleted off the internet, so I can’t,” Shinichi says, to a palpably unimpressed silence. “Good riddance, right? Anyway, just answer the question. What would you do if you jokingly told a guy that you like bad boys, and then he started changing everything about himself to match what you said was ‘bad boy’ behavior? Does that mean that he likes you?”

“Does this have to do with Kid?” Ran says, in a terrifying display of what she’s called “a woman’s intuition.” Shinichi’s goggling must be audible, because she laughs, not meanly but not exactly kindly either. “Sonoko sent me a bunch of posts about him driving that Bugatti last night. Apparently, he reached out to her uncle for help borrowing it for the night? She also said that she’s trying to get in contact with Zegna to see if they would agree to outfit him, kind of like a sponsorship. You wouldn’t be calling if the behavior changes weren’t significant, and that was a pretty big departure from the norm for Kid. Plus you’ve always been super weird about him, even when you were Conan. The way you guys interact has always felt like pigtail pulling.”

So this is what it’s like being on the receiving end of a deduction show, Shinichi thinks. He can see why nobody likes it when he does it.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with Kid,” he says. “But, you know, hypothetically, if it did have something to do with Kid, how should I interpret that?”

“You should interpret it as Kid having a crush on you.”

“Kid doesn’t have a crush on me,” Shinichi says.

“Yes, he does,” Ran says.

“Yes, I do,” Kaito says. “I mean, yes, he does.”

Shinichi jumps and turns to see Kaito standing a scant half-foot away from him. Evidently his lecture finished early, while Shinichi’s attention was diverted. He’s wearing the uniform of a typical graduate student (sweatshirt, track pants, and a mildly manic gleam in his eyes) and clutching a tattered bookbag. (Somehow he’s pulling off the look, Shinichi realizes with some disappointment.) When they make startled-deer eye contact, Kaito gives his head a violent side-to-side shake, the way the cat does when he “catches” his toys and breaks their metaphorical spines.

“That’s just my gut feeling,” he says, shifting his weight from side to side. “I’m not friends with Kid or anything.” He waves a hand. “No association. Totally different people. I just think you guys have a rich history together and he’s your type. Especially now that he’s coincidentally gotten rid of the cape and has started driving cool sportscars that are really difficult to handle on Japanese streets because the steering wheel is on the left.” Seeming to realize that he’s babbling, Kaito closes his mouth and goes ever-so-slightly pink. “Sorry. I’m surviving on three shots of espresso from the student union. I didn’t get much sleep last night.” His eyes widen. “For reasons unrelated to the heist!”

“Ran, let me call you back,” Shinichi says slowly. Over the line, Ran is saying something that sounds like, “Wait, what? Sportscars? Is Kid there with you?” He hangs up and shoves his phone into his pocket, giving Kaito a squinty-eyed look. “So you agree that Kid is trying to be a bad boy, huh?”

“He’s totally a bad boy,” Kaito says. “He probably would never take care of a stray cat. Super badass. Just what you like.”

There’s a moment of silence. A bell rings somewhere, and students begin to flow out into the walkway, parting around where Shinichi and Kaito are standing like river water navigating around a couple of dense rocks. Well, one rock that is doing an excellent impression of being extremely dense. Although at this point, Shinichi isn’t sure if it's just an impression.

“Okay,” he says eventually. “Well, I hope Kid figures out that I prefer people who are direct and able to communicate clearly like adults.” He clears his throat, pointed. Kaito blinks at him for a second, tilting his head to one side, before he seems to give a shrug.

“I’m sure he’ll figure it out,” he says before straightening. “Are you ready? Do you have any ideas?” Shinichi brightens at the reminder of why he’s even meeting up with Kaito in the first place. He hastens to unlock his phone and scroll through his saved Instagram posts.

“Yes. I looked into it, and there’s a pet boutique in Ginza that looks promising. I also found some online stores that do custom orders, in case we don’t find anything that we can agree on.”

“That works for me,” Kaito says. He reaches out to sling an arm around Shinichi’s neck and steer him down the path towards the front gates of the campus, possibly under the guise of looking at the address on Shinichi’s phone. Even though there’s layers of fabric between them, Shinichi still finds himself melting under the weight of his touch. “I’m sure the cat will appreciate whatever sartorial choices we make on his behalf.” Shinichi doubts that, but Kaito’s hand flicks up to ruffle his hair and he finds that he doesn’t want to disagree. That would mean the end of this little shopping expedition, after all.

“What if we got him a little deerstalker cap and an inverness cape?” he says. Kaito squawks.

“He’ll look like Hakuba,” he gasps, clutching at his heart.

“He’ll look like Sherlock Holmes,” Shinichi rebuts hopefully, looking up at Kaito through his eyelashes. Kaito, who was gearing up for a rant, judging from the stormy look on his face, seems to freeze for a second before he deflates. There's resignation written all over his face.

“But the only person in real life who wears that outfit is Hakuba,” he mumbles, shoulders slumping. He hasn’t removed his arm from Shinichi’s person, though, and he doesn’t say anything when Shinichi hazards a casual lean into his side as they wait at a stoplight to cross a street. In fact, he presses back against Shinichi. Shinichi smirks internally. Yes, the cat is most certainly going to get a deerstalker and inverness.  

Totoro. Konnyaku. Tanuki.

ah i see all gray just like that cat! ur so smart!! but no

Aluminum. Ashes. Storm Cloud. Cobblestone. Concrete. Dirty Snow. African Gray Parrot. Elephant.

now i think u just looked up a list of things that are gray?

Trashcan.

ok that would actually be a funny name for a cat not gonna lie

“I like that one,” Momoko says. Shinichi sighs.

“Really?” He makes a face at the photo that she indicated on his computer screen. In it, the cat is wearing a hideous fuzzy orange sweater that Kaito had insisted on. It had taken many Churus and half a gigabyte of photo storage, but they had gotten one shot where the cat looked perfectly Disney-esque, wide-eyed and politely poised on top of his crate, tail draped stripey and soft over the edge. “The sweater is a bit… much, don’t you think? And keep in mind, this is going to be included all my New Year cards. It’ll be most of my friends’ first introduction to him.”

“It’s the juxtaposition that’s good,” Momoko says sagely, taking a long drag from her bottle of juice (Shinichi managed to scrounge up a twirly straw for her today). Shinichi blinks at the use of juxtaposition. He’s pretty sure that even when he was Conan, aka sixteen but with a six-year-old’s brain capacity, he didn’t have that kind of lexicon. “He’s a cute cat, so seeing him in an ugly sweater just emphasizes the cuteness. It’s the gap.”

“Maybe,” Shinichi says, doubtful. Wistfully, he scrolls back over to the inverness and deerstalker pictures that he’d taken. Though Kaito had split the cost of the outfit and helped Shinichi get the cat into it, he had refused to help get the cat to sit still for the pictures, so most of them were blurry and featured the cat darting around his little area, fumbling at his head to try to get the hat off. “I guess you’re right. That’s probably the best picture we took.”

Momoko’s mother chooses that moment to blow through the door to the station, looking harried and as though she’s been carrying the weight of an entire household on her shoulders. (Over the course of their acquaintance, Shinichi has learned that Momoko’s husband is an aspiring gym influencer, in addition to being terrible at co-parenting. He has also given Momoko’s mother several of Kisaki Eri’s business cards. While Ran’s mother is technically a defense attorney, he’s sure that she would love to be Momoko’s mother’s divorce lawyer in this particular case.)

“Mom!” Momoko says, throwing her arms out for a hug. Her mother hurries up to the desk to answer the call.

“Were you good for Kudou-san, Momo? Sorry, Kudou-san,” she says to Shinichi when she pulls away, shoving handfuls of hair out of her flushed face. “There was some breaking news that came in just as I was meaning to come pick Momo up—” Her expression shifts all of a sudden, clicking into something bloodhound-sharp, as though she’s made some vital connection. “You know, you might actually be able to help out with it.”

“Is it a case?” Shinichi says with maybe too much eagerness. “Murder?” He hears the hopeful note in his own voice. Definitely too much eagerness.

“A beheading?” Momoko asks with just as much excitement. Her mother glances between her and Shinichi with the slightest furrow between her eyebrows.

“No,” she says after a long moment, during which she seems to assess her choice to leave Momoko with him for hours at a time. “It’s a Kid heist note that was sent out to all the major media outlets. Nobody has been able to solve it yet.”

“Wasn’t Kid's last heist only a few days ago?” Shinichi says, arching an eyebrow. He has a familiar sinking feeling in his stomach, reminiscent of the feeling he’d gotten the second before Gin had conked him on the head at Tropical Land all those years before: the sense that things are about to go catastrophically wrong. “Why would he send out another heist notice so quickly?”

“We don’t know, but we were trying to figure it out at the office so that we could be the first newspaper to crack the code,” Momoko’s mother says with a shrug. She smiles sweetly at him as she pulls a printout out of her bag. “But I’m sure you could solve it, right, Kudou-san?”

“Probably,” Shinichi says with a sigh, not even being arrogant. He extends a hand for the piece of the paper, takes one look at it, and groans, rubbing at his temples.

“Did you solve it?” Momoko asks, slapping her tiny palms against his desk.

“Unfortunately,” Shinichi answers. He lets her tug the paper out of his grasp.

“But it’s gibberish,” she says a minute later, perplexed. “Contemporary houses bequest thou proceed away accompanied by myself?”

“He basically inserted a synonym of each word of the sentence in isolation. Well, except for the ‘houses’ bit—that’s just a pun,” Shinichi tells her. He presses around his orbital bone. According to Ran, there are some acupressure spots there that will release tension once massaged, but right now, the massage is not enough to offset his budding headache. Probably only a lobotomy would work at this point. “The decoded message is ‘Modern Holmes, will you go out with me?’”

Momoko’s mother, who snatched the paper away from her daughter and started scribbling furiously when Shinichi started talking, goes still. Shinichi winces. Her posture brings to mind a shark that’s just scented blood on the water.

“Modern Holmes, as in you, Kudou-san?” she asks, shrewd.

“No,” Shinichi says, too fast. "I'm not the Modern Holmes. That's Hakuba Saguru. Or Hattori Heiji. Or anyone who's not me." Her eyes narrow. “Um, do you need to leave now? I think you should get going. It’s getting dark out.” He gestures at the windows.

“No, it’s barely four o’clock in the afternoon,” Momoko’s mother says. Momoko nods along beside her, looking intrigued. Shinichi shrinks down in his chair. “Are you having an affair with Kid, Kudou-san?”

“If I was having an affair with Kid, I doubt he’d ask me out by sending a note in code to every major news outlet,” Shinichi feels obliged to point out, belatedly realizing that he’s playing right into Momoko’s mother’s hands by engaging at all. She somehow maintains eye contact as she writes something down on her piece of paper. He clears his throat. “Hey, Momoko, do you want to hear about an enucleation I had the pleasure of witnessing?”

“Yes, obviously,” Momoko says, her metaphorical antenna going up as she jumps to her feet and leans forward with a broad smile. Shinichi experiences a moment of hope before her mother gives her a side-eyed glance, and she quells, sinking back in her seat. “After you finish talking to Mom, I mean.” Shinichi looks over at the aforementioned mom and sighs, somehow sure that she’s not leaving until she gets something headline-worthy out of him.

“Okay, fine.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Here’s my statement.”

Ran calls Shinichi early the following morning. It’s his day off, so he’s asleep when Ran’s call comes through. He deeply regrets allowing her calls to ring through even when his phone is on Do Not Disturb, because he’s awoken from a deeply satisfying dream (in which he teaches the cat to read) by the sound of Ran’s favorite Okino Yoko song blasting in his ear.

Lurching upright, he grabs his phone, hits the accept button, and mashes it to his cheek, more out of muscle memory than as the result of any kind of intentional neural activity.

“Hello?”

“I didn’t realize you had turned to a life of crime,” says Ran without preamble. This sentiment does not compute to Shinichi, who’s still partially experiencing the alternate reality where he’s watching the cat read A Study in Scarlet.

“Huh?” he says.

“You’re clearly trying to get Kid to throw himself off a bridge,” Ran says, which also makes no sense. Shinichi stares at his own comforter-covered feet as the last remnants of his dream fall away and leave him floundering in a much less preferred reality.

“Again, you’re going to need to be clearer, because I don’t follow. Also, he has a hang glider permanently strapped to him. He’d be fine if he fell off a bridge.”

“He doesn’t have the hang glider anymore because he stopped wearing the cape, so no, I don’t know that he’s going to be okay,” Ran points out. “And I’m referring to the interview that you did with this Harada Miki lady where you said you wouldn’t date Kid if he was the last person alive.”

“I didn’t say anything that harsh,” Shinichi argues, finally picking up on the thread of conversation. “My official statement was that I’m a police officer, so that should answer that question, and when she kept pressing me, I said that even if Kid wasn’t on the wrong side of the law, I wouldn’t consider dating him specifically because his communication skills are abysmal and his maturity is questionable based on the fact that he knows how to reach me privately, but instead he chose to ask me out in an extremely public manner, like someone who proposes with a public flash mob so as to guilt their partner into saying yes.” Ran waits. “Okay, I see what you mean.”

“Yeah,” Ran says, in tones of duh. “What are you going to do when Kid is found dead in a ditch? Does that make you complicit in his death? I’ll ask my mom what the laws are. She can represent you.”

“I’m allowed to reject someone without having to worry about them taking drastic consequences,” Shinichi says, although he can already picture the future headlines. That would most likely tank his career. “Anyway, I was just being honest. Like I said, Kid and I are friends. He can reach out to me directly and we can talk about it. Which is what I would’ve preferred from the start.”

“If you say so,” Ran says, sounding doubtful. “He’s kind of a diva. You really think it’ll be a casual conversation, when it’s about you rejecting him?”

“I’m not rejecting him,” Shinichi says, aghast.

“Again, we just finished talking about how you said you think he’s completely undateable.”

“I was…” Shinichi struggles for words. “Possibly a little frustrated with him and the way he’s been acting lately. He’s been… confusing. But I’ll explain myself once we talk.”

Ran makes a dubious noise and hangs up on him. Shinichi vows that she is no longer be eligible to be his best woman at the wedding, based solely on her lack of support.

Except, well, even the slightest possibility of a wedding seems to dissipate over the next few days. Kaito evades him with the skill of a veteran dodgeball player. Shinichi can tell that he’s still visiting the cat, because sometimes he’ll see a new toy lying around the clearing. But he doesn’t respond to Shinichi’s confused messages and guilt-tripping photos of the cat looking forlorn.

“I don’t know where he is either,” Shinichi says, petting the cat behind the ears as he sullenly eats his dinner one evening. It’s been a solid week and a half since he’s seen Kaito. He knows Kaito’s class schedule by now and he knows it’s not exam season, so there aren’t tenable reasons why he hasn’t been coming by at his usual times, except that he’s actively avoiding Shinichi. Shinichi sighs and rubs the cat behind his ears. “Sorry that we’ve made you a child of divorce before we’ve even gone out on a single real date.”

The cat meows at him and paws at his face until Shinichi gives him a treat.

At the two-week mark, Shinichi takes drastic action.

Kinomiya looks up from her sudoku book when Shinichi walks into the police box with his arms full of gray tabby. Her face slackens.

“So there was actually a cat?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you this whole time,” Shinichi sniffs, and goes back out to collect the rest of the cat’s belongings.

It feels underhanded to cut Kaito’s access like this, but, as Shinichi tells himself to stave off the guilt, it’s also starting to get cold out, and he thinks it’ll be good for the cat to have somewhere safe and warm to go at night. He sends Kaito a picture of the cat sitting on Kinomiya’s keyboard, his water and food bowls and bed in the background of the shot to indicate that the cat has been brought inside on a somewhat permanent basis. He gets no response.

For his part, the cat seems happy to have a place somewhere that has guaranteed central heating and an abundance of people who, though loud and frightening and desperate to shove their hands at him, are happy to barter for his attention with various treats. Shinichi has to intervene when Kinomiya (who’s a surprisingly soft touch for someone who denied the cat’s existence for weeks) attempts to feed the cat his tenth catnip treat of the day. She’s the worst offender because she’s always at the station, unlike the various people who pass through with their bits of chicken breast (Momoko) and canned salmon (Ran) and a half-eaten hamburger (Hattori, once, and Shinichi had banned him from interacting with the cat).

“Do you know what obesity does to a cat?” he says. Kinomiya rolls his eyes. Shinichi bombards her with articles about feline diabetes and heart disease until she cuts it out.

That takes a solid five days, and for the duration of those days, Shinichi doesn’t see Kaito. At first, he thinks maybe Kaito is finding some way to meet up with the cat outside of the station. But when he has a back-to-back shift one day, he comes to realize that despite his history as an outdoor cat, the cat barely leaves the station, maybe for fifteen-minute bursts at unpredictable times throughout the day. It may be because temperatures really are starting to drop and they’ve gotten a bit of rain.

Shinichi casts a critical gaze at where the cat is standing on his hind legs, using his front paws to open and close the drawers of the filing cabinet sitting in the far corner of the room. Each time he slams a drawer shut, there’s a deafening metallic bang. Eventually (though not soon enough for the health of Shinichi’s eardrums) he gets bored, yawns mouthily, and lumbers back over to his crate, where he licks himself for a minute before promptly falling asleep.

It is also very possible that the cat has chosen to be lazy, given a solid roof over his head, Shinichi reflects.

The unfortunate thing for Kaito is that Shinichi knows him too well. Technically, they’ve known each other for years, but also Shinichi has been interacting with him near-daily for weeks now, and Shinichi has been touted as the Modern Holmes, as Kaito is well aware. So two nights later, when Kaito creeps into the police station under cover of darkness at 1:47 a.m. with a bag of dried tuna treats in hand, only for Shinichi to flick on his desk lamp and spin around in his desk chair with the cat sprawled asleep across his lap, supervillain style—neither of them are really surprised.

“Dammit,” Kaito mutters, standing out of the instinctive crouch he’d dropped into when the lights came on. He’s wearing all black, complete with a leather jacket and knit beanie slouched over his head, and looks like a wannabe biker. Unfortunately, it’s doing a lot for Shinichi, especially after not seeing him for what feels like so long. Shinichi sees his hand listing towards his back pocket, where he’s undoubtedly stashed a canister of sleeping gas, and raises a single eyebrow.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” He gestures down at the cat. “Unless you can guarantee that your sleeping gas recipe is cat friendly?”

Kaito follows his gaze, grimaces, and drops his hand.

“I guess I shouldn’t ask how you knew I was coming,” he says, resigned, and tugs off his beanie so he can run a hand through his hair, shaking out the unruly tangles. Shinichi is embarrassed to find himself watching with a little too much non-academic interest. “I can’t believe you would hold our child captive to force me to see you. Isn’t that illegal?” He shoves the beanie and treats into the inner pockets of his jacket. Shinichi ignores the flutter in his stomach at the fact that Kaito is still referring to the cat as theirs.

“We haven’t settled on a custody arrangement,” he says, stroking the cat across the cheek. The cat purrs but doesn’t wake up. “And anyway, we aren’t divorced.” Kaito’s brows draw together, and he opens his mouth to say something, but Shinichi powers on, steamroller-style. “I have something to say to you, since it seems like we’re getting nowhere as things are.” He unclenches his jaw and squares his shoulders. It’s been a while since he actually had to say these particular words. “I like you. Will you go out with me on a date?”

Shinichi doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the look on Kaito’s face. It’s as if he’s undergoing a vital update to his operating system, but got stuck at the fifty-six percent completion mark. His face is frozen in an expression halfway between confusion and shock, his eyes wide and his lips parted. It’s a good look for him, as Shinichi finds most looks are, but as time drags on and they pass the minute mark, Shinichi starts to worry, especially since he’s not sure Kaito is breathing.

“Well?” he says, a little impatient.

“I thought I wasn’t your type,” Kaito says faintly, then seems to gain strength as the download evidently finishes. Scoffing, he frowns and throws his hands up, shoulders tensing. Even as he does a caricature of outrage, twin spots of pink appear on his cheeks and there’s a gleam in his eyes. Shinichi likes to think it looks like hope. “You said you liked bad boys!”

“I thought it was obvious I was joking. I would never date someone who wouldn’t take care of a stray cat. That’s psychopath behavior,” Shinichi informs him. “I would’ve said something sooner, but then you started acting weird as Kid and it confused me because I couldn’t figure out what you wanted. It seemed like you were trying to get me to date Kid, which makes no sense. Did you think I would date Kid if he was a ‘bad boy’?”

“I thought—” Kaito freezes again. He must need to buffer. “Wait, I ‘starting acting weird as Kid’? You know I’m Kid?”

Shinichi stares at him.

“Are you joking now?” he asks.

“I mean…” Kaito hesitates, looking as though he’s trying to decide between saving face (dodging the question) and being honest (looking stupid). Little does he know that he’ll look stupid either way, Shinichi thinks with a frightening amount of affection. “No.”

“Kaito,” Shinichi says, patient, “I recognized you as Kid the second I saw you. We’ve been facing off for years, and you don’t really disguise yourself other than your outfit. I know what you look like. I could pick out your voice in a lineup.” It’s only after he finishes speaking that he realizes he just called Kaito by his first name, no honorifics. Kaito seems to have gotten stuck on that part as well—the flush on his cheeks has progressed down his neck, down underneath the edge of his black turtleneck.

“Oh,” he says in a small voice.

“Yeah,” Shinichi agrees, even as he fights back his own flush. “So you can understand why I was so confused when you tried to change yourself as Kid. Why would you think that I’d ever be more interested in Kid than you?” It sounds a little emotionally revealing when Shinichi puts it that way, but he can’t hide his incredulity.

“Well, I thought you were serious about liking bad boys, and Kid has more of a bad boy persona,” Kaito says feebly. At Shinichi’s unimpressed look, through which Shinichi tries to communicate “Don’t forget how many of your ridiculous heists I’ve attended,” he heaves a sigh, his shoulders drooping. “I don’t really know what I was thinking. When you said you only date bad boys, I thought since you already knew me, Kuroba Kaito, you knew that I wasn’t that. And Kid… well, Kid could become that. Between him and me, it would be much more believable if he were to suddenly start driving flashy cars and ditching the cape.”

“If you thought that you were hiding your identity from me, why would you have Kid change himself to the exact specifications that I mentioned to you, Kuroba Kaito? And in that case, I've known Kid for years, so him drastically changing his personality would be even weirder than Kuroba Kaito doing a one-eighty,” Shinichi points out. “And logistically, how would I have gone about dating Kid, anyway? Clandestine rooftop dinners where you wear full Kid regalia?” Kaito laughs.

“You really think I was thinking things through? I was mostly just desperate to have you from the moment we met as Kuroba Kaito and Kudou Shinichi,” he says, which is somehow pathetic, slightly concerning, and romantic all at once. Only Kaito could manage to hit that particular note, Shinichi thinks. “I sent out that note to the press because you said you wanted someone direct and straightforward, and that was the best I thought I could do as Kid. But then I really thought I’d blown it when you gave that interview saying you’d never date Kid. I thought, well, Kuroba Kaito isn’t his type, and he won’t date Kid, so I’m shit out of luck. I would’ve gotten over it and responded to your messages.” Shinichi gives him a narrow look. Kaito clears his throat. “Eventually.”

“I stand by what I said. Minus the criminal stuff, I suppose,” Shinichi says, letting him slide on that offense. “There’s no way that I would date Kid. On the other hand, I’ve been wanting to date Kuroba Kaito for a long time.”

“Oh.” Kaito bites his bottom lip, inevitably drawing Shinichi’s attention to it. He takes a step closer to Shinichi, his eyes going darker. There’s a tangible shift in the atmosphere. Shinichi almost feels like he needs to hold his breath. Instead, he inhales deeply as Kaito takes another step forward, his voice low as he asks, “Is that so?”

“Unfortunately,” Shinichi says. He wonders if the cat, who’s still blissfully asleep in his lap, can feel the way his heart is hammering behind his ribs. “I was a little frustrated with how Kaito was approaching the situation, since I could tell that he was interested in me too. And I may have gone too far with the newspaper interview. But that made me realize that it was hypocritical of me to complain about how bad Kaito was at communicating his feelings when I wasn’t telling him how I felt.”

“And how do you feel?” Kaito is much closer now. With a single movement, he leans forward, bracing his arms against the edge of Shinichi’s desk, trapping Shinichi between them. Shinichi tries to swallow subtly, but fails, judging from the way Kaito’s gaze dips. “How do you feel about me, darling?”

“I’m desperate to have you,” Shinichi admits, tipping his head back to look Kaito in the eye. He just manages to catch sight of the grin that splits Kaito’s face before Kaito surges forward to bring their mouths together, one hand lifting to cradle the back of Shinichi’s head.

This is how Kinomiya finds them when she comes back from patrol.

“Well,” she says from the doorway to the station, and flicks on the overhead lights. Shinichi, who has one hand underneath Kaito’s leather jacket and had been contemplating getting the other underneath Kaito’s turtleneck, jumps to his feet so quickly he almost knocks Kaito over. The cat, who had managed to sleep through the shenanigans occurring over his head, finds himself abruptly dumped to the ground. He turns to glare at them, promising murder at an unspecified future date, then slinks off to his crate, where his bed is much less likely to suddenly shift beneath him. Kaito doesn’t have the good grace to look embarrassed as he straightens, giving Kinomiya a lazy grin. He slips his hands oh-so-casually into the pockets of his black jeans and shifts so he’s half hidden behind Shinichi. This maneuver is most certainly not missed by Kinomiya, whose eyebrows manage to make it another half-inch up her forehead.

Briefly, Shinichi considers moving to a remote island where he’ll never see another living soul again, then is forced to abandon the idea when he realizes that he’d miss the cat too much.

“Hi, Kinomiya-senpai,” he says, coughing violently when it comes out husky. Kinomiya is still looking at him with an unreadable expression.

“Kudou-kun,” she returns.

“Hiya, Kinomiya-san,” Kaito offers, grinning. Shinichi elbows him on principle, though Kaito doesn’t seem to mind. Kinomiya gives him a single, sharp nod.

“Kuroba-kun.”

There is an awkward silence.

“So we were both right then,” she says after what feels like several eternities laid end-to-end. Shinichi blinks at her. She must pick up on his bewilderment, because she clarifies, “About you ‘taking care of the cat’ with Kuroba-kun. There’s an actual cat, and there’s also canoodling.”

“Yes,” Shinichi agrees after a long pause, during which he tried desperately to think of a better word than “canoodling” and came up empty, possibly because his brain is still on the fritz after the feeling of Kaito’s lips on his neck. “There is… canoodling.”

“Can we get back to it?” Kaito asks. Shinichi elbows him harder. Kinomiya glances at the clock, then shrugs.

“I mean, Kudou-kun’s technically not on duty right now. He just came here to wait for you to show up, Kuroba-kun, since he said you wouldn’t be able to stay away from the cat for longer than a week. So, sure, you two can get back to it.” She pauses. “But maybe not here.”

“But it’s always been a fantasy of mine to—” Kaito starts. Shinichi reaches back with one hand, pats down Kaito’s front until he locates Kaito’s solar plexus, and then jams an elbow back into it. There is a grunt and then faint wheezing from behind him. Kinomiya watches placidly. The cat, annoyed at the continued noise, gives an irate meow.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. Good night, Kinomiya-senpai,” Shinichi says, then grabs Kaito by the arm and begins to tow him out of the station. Kaito goes easily, skipping for a couple paces until he’s caught up to Shinichi and can wrap an arm around Shinichi’s waist, holding him close. It reminds Shinichi of that time at the crosswalk, when they had been about to go clothes shopping for the cat and Kaito had tacitly agreed to get the inverness and deerstalker. Shinichi had somehow known in that moment that Kaito was probably in love with him. Now, he looks up at Kaito’s profile, stained pink from the chill in the air, and can’t help but smile to himself as he settles his own arm around Kaito’s back.

“Conan,” Kaito says suddenly, after a minute of walking. Shinichi, surprised, glances over at him and finds that Kaito is already gazing at him with soft eyes, the same way Shinichi had looked at him just moments ago. He fights down a blush.

“Huh?”

“That’s what I named the cat,” Kaito says, which is so surprising that Shinichi stops in the middle of the sidewalk and disengages so he can fully absorb what Kaito is saying. Implying. They’re under a streetlight, so Shinichi gets to enjoy the full range of emotion on Kaito’s face—embarrassment, then growing panic undercut with forced casualness.

“You named the cat Conan?” Shinichi repeats dumbly.

“Yep.” Kaito rocks back on his heels.

“Didn’t you find him as a kitten?”

“Also yep.”

“Which was over a year ago, at this point. Because that’s when he would’ve been a kitten.”

“They don’t call you the Modern Holmes for no reason, huh? You’ve really got a handle on basic math.”

“Huh,” Shinichi says again. Kaito is avoiding his eyes. “Wow, Kaito, you had a crush on me all this time? You’ve been pining away for me?” Kaito scowls at him. It’s undermined when Shinichi lean up to kiss him and his expression is all gooey and lovestruck when Shinichi pulls back, his entire body listing forward as if magnetized to Shinichi’s. Not that Shinichi is any better. “How embarrassing for you.”

“He was roughly the same size as you when you were Conan,” Kaito points out, which is patently untrue. Shinichi was at least a little taller than the cat was. Probably. Shinichi is about to inform him of that when Kaito continues, “And he’s extremely cute and smart and naturally suspicious of everyone, until he gets to know them,” which throws him for a loop.

“That’s not what I’m like,” he says, frowning.

“Of course not,” Kaito placates.

“I’m not.”

“Whatever you’d like to believe, darling.” Kaito grins smugly. "The other big similarity is that he loves me."

Shinichi would have argued the point longer, but Kaito chose that moment to kiss him again, so he decided it was an argument better saved for later.